OAFVC Blog

How to Operate Your Farm-to-Table Business Long Distance

If you run a farm-to-table business, chances are most of your operations take place on a farm. You work hard, and farm life is great — the outdoors, early mornings, physical activity, and doing what you love, all beat the 9-5 suit-and-tie office grind — until it’s time to process all that food you’ve harvested. If you don’t have a commercial kitchen or food storage space on site, farm life can begin to feel a little stressful.

To some extent, travel and food transportation throughout your day comes with the trade. But that doesn’t negate the fact that travel is expensive, time consuming, and can be environmentally unfriendly, especially if you need to make multiple trips, multiple times a month to get your product from your farm to a commercial kitchen, then back home for storage. Add in the fact that you should touch and move your food product as few times as possible for food safety, and to lessen expense and labour, making transport even more difficult.

4 Ways to Take the Distance Out of Your Farm to Table Business

The Ontario Agri-Food Venture Centre (OAFVC) is a food processing facility in Northumberland County, conveniently located just off Highway 401, that keeps your farm to table business local. Whether you’re using the commercial kitchen, the product development lab, or the food processing, packaging, storage, or business services, here are some of the ways that OAFVC can save your business time and money.

At OAFVC you don’t have to make multiple trips: OAFVC has shared food storage facilities with plenty of storage space for refrigerator, freezer, or flash freeze options. Once your product arrives at the facility for processing it doesn’t have to leave again until you’re ready to send it to distributors, restaurants, or stores.

At OAFVC staff are here to help: OAFVC staff are food processing experts that can help you streamline the production process to save you time. They help you and your staff — or step in as staff if your business hasn’t expanded yet. OAFVC staff can also train you on how to use the equipment and guide you and your staff on the product process. OAFVC staff also acts as quality assurance if you’re not there or need extra help to ensure that your product meets Canadian food regulations and guidelines.

At OAFVC you can get it all at an affordable price: Room rentals start as low as $150/half day. Storage rentals start as low as $30/month. Services include everything from washing and cutting produce, to flash freezing, packaging and labelling, training, and business consulting.

At OAFVC you can accept deliveries: You can have other products or packaging for your local food production business delivered to OAFVC instead of transporting them yourself. OAFVC has a food-grade shipping and receiving dock.

Are There Other Roadblocks to How You Operate Your Local Food Production Business?

Time and money spent in transport and travel aren’t the only roadblocks to expanding your business. Download this ebook to discover how OAFVC can help you overcome other obstacles that may also be affecting your business.